Site Mobile Navigation

Virginia Gunman Identified as a Student

Reema Samaha, 18, a freshman from Centreville, Va., in a family photo, left.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

The gunman who killed 32 people and himself on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute Monday was identified today as a student who lived in a dormitory on campus but kept to himself.

Law enforcement authorities said the gunman was Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean who was a resident alien in the United States and in his senior year as an English major.

Mr. Cho was described by fellow students in television interviews broadcast today as being “thorough” as he moved through the classrooms opening fire. He was wearing an outfit that resembled a boy scout and trying to push through doors that were barricaded by students.

In a photograph distributed by the police after his identity was released, Mr. Cho is shown wearing eyeglasses with close cropped hair, staring directly into the camera with little expression.

Photo

Members of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets gathered in the War Memorial Chapel on campus.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

At least 15 were also injured after the two shooting attacks at the university on Monday during three hours of horror and chaos on this sprawling campus.

In a news conference today, authorities said ballistic tests showed that one of two weapons found in Norris Hall, a classroom building where most of the killing took place, had also been used in the other location, West Ambler Johnston Hall, a 900-student freshman dormitory where the first shootings took place.

Mr. Cho moved to the United States with his family as a grade school student in 1992, government officials in South Korea said.

While he had a residence established in Centreville, Va., Mr. Cho was living on campus in Harper Residence Hall. He was described as a “loner” by the university’s associate vice president, Harry Hincker, on CNN.

Photo

Cho Seung-Hui

It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history and came nearly eight years to the day after 13 people died at Columbine High School in Colorado at the hands of two disaffected students who then killed themselves.

The police and witnesses said some victims were executed while other students were hurt jumping from upper-story windows of the classroom building where most of the killings occurred. After the second round of killings, the gunman killed himself, the police said.

Investigators were trying to sift through what Col. W. Steve Flaherty, the state police superintendent, described as a “horrific crime scene” at Norris Hall, where the shooting had caused tremendous chaos and panic. A 9-millimeter handgun and 22-caliber handgun were recovered from the building

Personal belongings were strewn about on the second floor. Victims were found in four classrooms and a stairwell.

“We know that there were a number of heroic events took place,” he said.

Today, the university’s president, Charles W. Steger, said that the campus would host a convocation attended by President Bush later in the day. Classes have been canceled for the week to allow students to grieve. Norris Hall would be closed completely for the semester.

“I want to assure you that we are doing everything possible to move forward,” he said.

Survivors told dramatic stories of the events.

Zach Petkewicz, a student, said he barricaded a classroom door to keep the gunman out, and the gunman shot through the door.

“Me and two others got up, threw a couple of tables in front of it and had to physically hold it there while there were gunshots going on,” he said on CNN. “He came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn’t get it in because we were pushing up against it. He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That’s when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out.”

Photo

Three students, from left, Sam Benedict, Lisa Weisbrod and Andrea Shome, consoling each other Monday night on the Virginia Tech campus.Credit
Melanie Blanding for The New York Times

Mr. Petkewicz said the gunman reloaded and “kept firing down the hall.”

“He seemed very thorough about it,” said a student, Erin Sheehan, who said in an interview with CNN that she was in a classroom where the gunman opened fire, and then later tried to break his way back into the room as students inside barricaded the door.

Joseph Cacioppo, a surgeon at Montgomery Regional Hospital who treated some of the injured, said on CNN that the injuries showed that the gunman was “brutal.” None of the injured that he treated had “less than three to four wounds in them,” he said.

According to the college newspaper, The Collegiate Times, many of the deaths took place in a German class in Norris Hall.

At least 17 of the wounded were still in the hospital this morning. One of them was the girlfriend of a student, Paul Geiger, 21, who was at Montgomery Regional Hospital this morning to visit her.

Photo

Students gathered near a chapel on the Virginia Tech campus.Credit
Evan Vucci/Associated Press

“She was part of the German class that got hit,” he said of his girlfriend, who had been shot in the hand. “She helped barricade the door. For me, she is my hero.” On Monday President Bush sent his condolences to the families of the victims and the university community. “Schools should be places of sanctuary and safety and learning,” Mr. Bush said. “When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community.”

Mr. Bush has ordered flags at half-staff through Sunday at sunset.

They are going to the convocation “as representatives of the entire nation,” said Dana Perino, the deputy White House press secretary. “They are going to be there to express the sympathies, the support and the prayers of the country.”

A university spokeswoman, Jenn Lazenby, said the university was looking into whether two bomb threats at the campus — one last Friday, the other earlier this month — might be related to the shootings.

Questions have been raised about whether university officials had responded adequately to the shootings.

There was a two-hour gap between the first shootings, when two people were killed, and the second, when a gunman stalked through the halls of an engineering building across campus, shooting at professors and students in classrooms and hallways, firing dozens of rounds and killing 30. Officials said he then shot himself so badly in the face that he could not be identified.

The university did not send a campus wide alert until the second attack had begun, even though the gunman in the first had not been apprehended.

“We had one shooting early in the morning that initially, and we don’t know the answer to this, appeared to be a domestic fight, perhaps a murder-suicide,” Mr. Steger said. “It was characterized by our security people as being contained to that dorm room.”

“As we were working through what we were going to do to deal with that, the message came on over the radio that another shooting across campus was taking place, and that’s when the large number of people were killed.”

Photo

Charles W. Steger, left, the university president, and Wendell Flinchum, the campus police chief, answered questions Monday.Credit
Melanie Blanding for The New York Times

Responding to criticism and suggestions that there was a delay between the first shooting and the first e-mail notifying students that something had happened, he said that the first dormitory was immediately closed down after the first incident and surrounded by security guards. Streets were cordoned off and students in the building notified about what was going on, he said.

“We also had to find witnesses because we didn’t know what had happened,” he said. Wounded people were sent to hospital and, based on the interrogation of witnesses, they thought “there was another person involved.”

The Virginia Tech attacks started early in the morning, with a call to the police at 7:15 from, as students were getting ready for classes or were on their way there.

Students said a gunman had gone room to room looking for his ex-girlfriend. He killed two people, a senior identified as Ryan Clark, from Augusta, Ga., and a freshman identified by other students on her floor as Emily Hilscher.

The shootings at the engineering building, Norris Hall, began about 9:45.

Some of the professors who were killed were named. Among them were Prof. Liviu Librescu, a Romanian Israeli who has lived in the United States for several years, and Dr. G.V. Loknathan, who was originally from India and became an American citizen after arriving in the United States in 1977.

Up until today, the deadliest campus shooting in United States history was in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a clock tower and opened fire, killing 16 people before he was shot and killed by the police. In the Columbine High attack in 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.

The single deadliest shooting in the United States came in October 1991, when George Jo Hennard crashed his pickup truck through the window of a Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Tex., then shot 22 people dead and wounded at least 20 others. He shot himself in the head.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 32 Shot Dead at Virginia Tech in Nation’s Worst Rampage With Guns. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe